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Tatarlı – The Return of Colors
Historical Significance of the Tatarlı Tomb Chamber
Christopher Tuplin
Regional significance
Surviving material traces of Persian rule in Asia Minor are rarer than one could wish and not distributed evenly across the region. This is partly because archaeological investigation has concentrated more in some areas than others. Thus it is that the westernmost satrapal centres, Sardis and Dascylium, have attracted much study, whereas Celaenae –a place of comparable status– has been neglected. The Tatarlı tomb lies 30 km north-east of Celaenae on a route that leads eventually to the Phrygian royal city of Gordium, and its revelation as a major monument of the Achaemenid era has had the beneficial effect of drawing serious attention both to Celaenae itself and to the relevant part of south-western Phrygia.
So far as Celaenae goes, a project now under way to complete the first systematic archaeological survey of the site will hopefully be the start of a process –perhaps including targeted excavation– that will shed more light on the Persian occupation and restore to Celaenae something of the status proper to a city that was the residence of Pythius the Lydian (purportedly the second richest man alive after the Great King and probably a descendant of King Croesus of Lydia), the site of a palace built by Xerxes after his defeat in Greece and the place where an executioner’s blade finally despatched Tissaphernes – the slippery and apparently treacherous satrap familiar from Thucydides and Xenophon.
But it is not only Celaenae that deserves attention. The environs of Tatarlı contain many tumuli. They cannot all be excavated and the activities of tomb-robbers may turn out to have rendered any excavation that is undertaken fruitless. But proof that at least one tumulus housed the remains of a man with links to the Iranian ruling power invites more precise assessment of the number and distribution of burial mounds and some evaluation of the nature of elite occupation in the region. We are not, of course, dealing with funerary memorialisation on the scale seen around Sardis. This is hardly surprisingly, as Sardis had been the royal capital of Lydia whereas Celaenae was historically a more provincial place within Phrygia. (Gordium, not Celaenae, is the Phrygian equivalent of Sardis.) But this does not make it less important to consider the relationship of satrapal Celaenae to its hinterland. On the contrary, there is a pressing need to compare and contrast the situation at Celaenae not only with Sardis but also with Dascylium –itself dissimilar to Sardis– and Gordium. Historians of the Achaemenid Empire continually face the difficulty of deciding whether the key characteristic of the empire’s hold upon its numerous constituent regions was uniformity or diversity, and they need every opportunity to test the issue. Regional assessments of Lydia and Hellespontine Phrygia (and of slightly different areas such as Caria or Lycia) have been done or are in train. Tatarlı is a reminder that the headwaters of the Maeander and the south-western fringes of the Anatolian plateau to which there was such comparatively easy access in the vicinity of Celaenae need attention too.
The monument itself
The Tatarlı tumulus provides the latest example of a Phrygian-style wooden tomb and the only surviving painted wooden tomb-chamber from antiquity. It thus occupies a special position in the history of funerary practices - an isolated insight into the way in which the dead of a certain social status were honoured in west-central Anatolia in the mid first millennium BC and one in which we are conscious both of continuity and of novelty.
This is evident in the tomb’s general character. The enclosure of a wooden house in an earth tumulus was established Phrygian practice, the finest example being the Tomb of Midas at Gordium. But the dromos-like approach to the chamber displays Lydian influence. The mixture is natural given the relative proximity to Lydia of this part of Phrygia and the association of Celaenae with a descendant of Lydian royalty, but the (so far) unique appearance of such a neat combination of two traditions in a type of monument with emblematic status in each is a welcome addition to our picture of cultural interpenetration.
Multiple cultural identities and unique individual features are also characteristic of the tomb’s painted decoration. The battle between Persians and Scythians, two peoples who were outsiders to Anatolia, sits literally alongside a scene in which a war-dance is performed by men who carry characteristically Anatolian sickle-shaped weapons and who –despite overtones of the pyrrhike familiar in Greek contexts– must be understood to be Phrygian soldiers. Meanwhile elsewhere in the cycle we have a herd of winged bulls –animals which, even if they are part of a representation of the story of Herakles and Geryoneus, are without individual or collective parallel– and three chariots with a hitherto unseen form of draught-pole and harnessing.
Unlike the winged bulls, the battle- and procession-scenes are not without iconographic analogy. Indeed, they are in essence quite familiar from various contexts, notably seal-stones from several parts of the empire, carved stelae from Hellespontine Phrygia and Lydia and a tomb at Karaburun in North-East Lycia containing what was until the resurrection of Tatarlı the most celebrated funerary painting in Achaemenid Anatolia. What distinguishes them from these parallels is size: the Tatarlı scenes contain far more figures than their equivalents elsewhere. Students of the latter (particularly battle-scenes on seal-stones) have often wondered whether they were in effect excerpts from a grander iconographic template. Tatarlı now suggests that that suspicion was well-founded – for there is certainly little incentive to think that the Tatarlı artist was inventively expanding what were previously more limited scenes: the relatively poor execution of the painting and some apparent misunderstandings of Persian clothing and iconography suggest that we are dealing with an ordinary artisan rather than an innovative artist.
That supposition has other repercussions. On the one hand, unique iconography such as the herd of winged bulls may after all be an accidental product of the painter’s engagement with models now lost. On the other, there are potential implications for our assessment of the identity and status of the tomb-owner. His name will never be known, but the decoration of his tomb shows that his identity was at least partly defined by his relationship to the Persian rulers of Phrygia: that is why the walls are adorned with a victory of Persians over Scythians (a symbolic expression of Persian superiority, not one of any immediate relevance to historical events in Phrygia) and by a procession in which everyone wears Persian garb. But the question is: how close was the relationship? Do the choice of a Phrygo-Lydian tomb-design, the inclusion of non-Iranian iconography and the involvement of a painter whose engagement with Iranian templates is that of a not particularly skilful or well-informed outsider all suggest that the deceased cannot himself have been a Persian? Or are the hidden assumptions here – that a Persian of the imperial diaspora would have had access to a better or more purely Iranian artist and would have rejected the acculturation apparently present in the cycle of paintings – simply false? This is not a new question for Achaemenid historians. We know from textual sources that there were Persians in distant imperial provinces, but detecting them in the material record is extremely difficult. Every time a new monument, especially from a hitherto under-represented area, fails (yet again) to provide an unambiguous reflection of such people we are driven closer to a stark choice about native representatives of the imperial power: either they had a real aversion to imposing themselves directly upon the local cultural landscape or (on the contrary) they were extremely relaxed about an engagement with it. There is no middle ground. In the former case Persians of the diaspora will always be virtually invisible and the Perserie we do see in the provinces is almost entirely the reserve of an indigenous elite absorbing and copying modes of behaviour which were surely visible locally but which were evidently – and deliberately -- only displayed in very limited ways, primarily inside residences that were themselves probably largely of indigenous architectural type. In the latter case, by contrast, native Persians in places such as Lydia or Phrygia may be perfectly visible – but we shall always struggle to be sure that we are seeing them and not just their local imitators.
New archaeological discoveries sometimes provide sudden solutions to well-known conundrums. Tatarlı is not like this: for example, the arrival of a new procession scene has still not definitively resolved long-standing uncertainties about the general character and detailed interpretation of such scenes in west Anatolian monuments. Nor is Tatarlı the sort of discovery that produces something precise, understandable and entirely new - a solution to a problem that we did not know we had. Its significance is rather as a fresh piece in the incomplete jigsaw of Achaemenid Anatolia - broadly similar to existing pieces but quite distinct in detail. It will provoke fresh reflections about the jigsaw and a renewed effort to discover still more of the pieces.
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